


It's Not Exhibitionism If You Don't Care Who's Watching

by astrugglingstoic



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes' Colorful Asides, Casualties: One Handrail, Civil War Era Minus the Civil War, Flagrant Public Displays of Affection, He Thinks He's Pretty Damn Hilarious Even If No One Else Does, Hostilely Amorous Living Environment, Intervention, M/M, Upstate Avengers Compound, crack adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24582172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrugglingstoic/pseuds/astrugglingstoic
Summary: “Don’t come yet,” he pants against Steve’s lips.“Why?” quickly followed by, “Wait—what?” and ridiculous baby blues popping wide open.“All of your friends are watching us.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 16
Kudos: 143





	It's Not Exhibitionism If You Don't Care Who's Watching

**Author's Note:**

> Alternately summarized as: 
> 
> “Kiss me.”  
> “What?”  
> “Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable.”  
> “Yes, they do.”

Was Steve always this good of a kisser? Definitely not, Bucky thinks.

(He taught Steve to kiss, summer of ’32, halfway through a sunny afternoon, the curtains closed but still bold as anything. Steve’s ma was at work. They shared a rare ice cream on the way home. Steve’s mouth was cold, sweet, irresistible, his tongue like an icicle. Both of them nearly jumped out of their skins when Bucky touched it with his own.)

Reliable intel from Romanoff informs him that Steve didn’t do much kissing in his absence either, herself and Peg excluded.

Although, until recently, he hadn’t kissed Steve since ’44, so he reckons Steve could just about open wide and face-smash him, and it would still be the most fucking fantastic thing in the world.

Steve must think it ain’t half bad, with those breathy groans spilling out of him. Getting handsier by the minute, too. Starting to buck under him like a bronco, which means he’s well on his way to feeling too good.

“Don’t come yet,” he pants against Steve’s lips. 

“Why?” quickly followed by, “Wait— _what_?” and ridiculous baby blues popping wide open.

“All of your friends are watching us.”

Steve’s head turns with the reluctance of a rusty hinge. The dawning horror, Bucky assumes. 

“Indeed. We arrived one minute, seventeen seconds ago,” Vision specifies.

Despite it being mid-autumn in New York, Barton’s munching from a canister of salted cashews in only a ratty cut-off. (His arms _are_ very nice.) “I thought he was supposed to have perfect hearing.” 

Bucky tosses his hair over his shoulder. “He’s been compromised.”

“But _you_ knew we were here the whole time—?” Rhodes checks.

“Sure.” Bucky figures he’s about four-fifths of a Steve-grade supersoldier, his hearing proportionately enhanced, but he has the (dis)advantage of not only HYDRA training but _Soviet_ HYDRA training, which never entirely lets up.

“—and you kept Frenching Captain America anyway?”

“Yep.”

“No. No, no, no, no, no,” Steve mutters, closing his eyes and burrowing further into the couch cushions. The first stage, then: denial. 

To be fair, they were necking in the living room in the middle of the day. Without a mission to occupy the Avengers, the odds of discovery just about reach inevitable. He decides to be flattered rather than concerned that these obvious details escaped Steve’s attention. (One of the greatest strategists of the twentieth century, his ass.)

“Could you maybe _untangle_ and assume a vertical position for this conversation?” Stark says.

Bucky’s eyes narrow calculatingly. “Careful what you ask for.” He might be pleasantly, languidly turned-on, but Steve’s threatening to poke another navel into him. (Of course now he’s reminded of that nature documentary he and Maximoff watched through their fingers where the insects traumatically inseminate their partners through the abdomen, and everything becomes a lot less funny.)

“C’mon, man,” Wilson grumbles, aggrieved and looking anywhere else but at the two of them.

How unpatriotic. Steve’s dick is practically a national monument. Bucky should charge tickets to visit and view it. (He did erect it himself, after all.)

“Buck,” Steve sighs, apparently having progressed to acceptance, “I don’t want to make everyone uncomfortable.” 

“Ha!” Stark barks before Rhodes elbows him.

Bucky relents. “Aye aye.”

As requested, he undrapes himself from between Steve’s legs; in exchange, he settles into an indolent sprawl with an arm slung around Steve’s shoulder to communicate just how inconvenient he finds this interruption.

After some conspicuous adjustments, Steve attempts to contain his hard-on by plucking the fly of his jeans away from his groin and tugging his teeny white tee lower. It’s adorably ineffective, and nobody’s looking below his neckline except for Romanoff, whose brief glimpse is clinical, and Stark, who gapes blankly at Steve’s tentpole.

Aside from Potts (who is too mature and sophisticated to set foot near this situation) and Banner (who is AWOL with one purloined Quinjet), Maximoff perhaps has the gentlest touch. Acting as the icebreaker, she glances between her teammates and says, “Steve. James. We’re so happy you found one another again.” She’s smiling very, very hard, to the extent of muscle damage. “This is your home as much as it is any of ours—”

Stark snorts. “Like any of you pay rent.”

“—and you should feel comfortable here.”

“Oh _no_ ,” Steve whispers, physiologically incapable of blushing a deeper shade of pink.

He pats Steve’s pec consolingly. The only way out now is through. 

“Uh- _huh_. You know what you did,” Stark accuses at Steve’s crotch, still (fittingly) poleaxed by the very existence of Steve’s erection. Bucky can only conclude that Stark’s previous theories regarding Steve’s nether regions were a) smooth, sexless, Ken-doll mound or b) vestigial organ—which must only make the current vigor of Steve’s tumescence all the more irreconcilable for him.

Wilson cuts Stark off before he gathers any steam and announces, “This is an intervention.”

“Kinda figured.” Everyone is still standing in front of the couch, looking down on them like parents ready to ground their teenagers for missing curfew. Excluding Barton, who’s dragged a stool from the kitchen island to the sidelines. Bucky signals to him, opening his mouth for a perfectly aimed cashew.

“Is this about the—?” Steve carries out some elaborate verbal flailing, throws in a few aborted hand gestures, but doesn’t get any further, the poor guy.

Rhodes blurts out, automatically, “The excessive and graphic _intermingling_?” He did not have to reach for that one. “Yeah. _Yes._ Yes, it is.” 

Steve’s beautiful, stupid mouth is gaping fish-like. “Maybe we’ve been a little more… _affectionate_ ,” he gags on the word, mortified, “than normal, but has it really been that noticeable?”

“He’s fondling your nipple, Steve,” Wilson intones.

(It’s true. Under his thumb, Steve’s right nipple is asymmetrically pointier and perkier than its leftward companion. But at least no one’s looking at his dick anymore.)

“Right in front of us!” Stark complains, pointing wildly at Bucky’s offending limb. “In the middle of our PDA PSA!” 

Steve claps a hand over his, giving him a disapproving if extremely flustered look. He’s undoubtedly more troubled that he was either too distracted or too accustomed to Bucky’s touch to notice. 

Romanoff shrugs. “I told them to leave you be. You’re re-honeymooning.” She scrunches her face into an overly cutesy smile intended to piss off Stark. “It’s sweet.” But there’s a sincerity to her words, too, if you know to listen for it.

“What about him?” Bucky jerks a thumb in Barton’s direction. “He’s retired. He doesn’t even live here. Why does he get a vote?”

Around a mouthful of cashews, Barton garbles, “Just here for the free entertainment.”

“But your farm’s in Missouri,” Steve protests, searching for logic in a situation where it really has no jurisdiction. “Halfway across the country. You have three children.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to miss _this._ They’ve been planning it for weeks.” 

Steve scowls.

Just to be contrary, Bucky says, “Vision’s walked in on all of us naked by now. How come he didn’t get an intervention?”

Naturally, Stark and Maximoff leap to his defense.

“Vision is an intricate and complex amalgam of artificial intelligence, android engineering, and cosmic power. He didn’t grow up with human societal norms. And he’s only a toddler!”

(All the accidental voyeurism musta been part of his terrible twos stage, then.)

“We fixed the walking-through-walls habit months ago.” Maximoff rubs her not-boyfriend’s sweatered shoulder.

Vision blinks needlessly and says, “Sergeant Barnes is quite accurate. I have seen all of you nude and in variously compromising circumstances.” He respectfully tilts his head. “I apologize.” 

Wilson crosses his arms, calling bullshit. “Phase-changing without knocking is not the same level of intentionally creepy as making out with Steve every time I walk into a room.” 

(Bucky’s memorized the weight and pattern of Wilson’s tread and prepares accordingly.)

“You afraid of some smooches, Sam?” Barton’s clearly just instigating matters now since he has no horse in this race. He likes Barton.

“No, you don’t _understand_ ,” Wilson grouses, his voice rising with indignation. “The Winter Menace over there makes direct eye contact with me when he slips Steve the tongue. Every. Time. It ain’t _natural.”_ Wilson addresses him personally. “I’m not trying to steal your man!”

(Sure you aren’t, Wilson. Sure you aren’t.)

Rhodes shakes his head vehemently, not hearing it. “Nope. Mine is way worse. I’ve caught some of their workouts in the gym. It gets _nasty_.”

Bucky’s offended by that characterization.

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose, intensely distressed.

“I’m talking about,” Rhodes whips out one hand and starts ticking off grievances on his fingers, “the erotic pre-workout stretching, the kissing between _every rep_ as they spot one another, the _strip-sparring_.”

“We’re incentivizing,” Bucky informs.

“You’re superhumanly fit,” Stark counters.

“You were in nothing but your underwear,” Rhodes reminds. 

“Those were athletic compression shorts.”

(Perhaps mercifully, Rhodes fails to mention that Steve often works out in a pair of magenta sweatpants that read “JUICY” across the ass. Bucky had to scour the women’s plus-size section to find a pair that would accommodate Steve’s shapely curves, and boy, was it worth it.) 

“Oh my god,” Steve croaks.

“What about the time I fit Spyborg with his new prosthesis? I was a foot away at my workbench, and he’s moaning loud enough to rattle glass while Steve massages him to a happy ending.”

Bless his heart, Steve always has his six. “That old arm gave him chronic back and neck pain—” 

“I was never really a spy,” Bucky corrects nonchalantly.

“—and there was no _ending.”_

“I’ll say,” Stark mutters. “I’m hammering louder and louder to drown out Barnes’ pornographic lowing, and they just keep going on and on and on, completely oblivious—”

“Okay, Tony. Jesus,” Steve pleads. 

Bucky raises one brow at Stark. “Did you just call me a cow?”

“As a couple of geriatrics, you probably have to resort to more drastic methods of stimulation to prime the machinery,” Bucky assumes that pun was for his benefit, “but you cannot fornicate in the common areas when I made everyone their own soundproofed bedrooms. I even fixed that bug in F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s protocols so that all privacy-mode recordings would stop automatically downloading themselves to everyone’s StarkPhones.” 

(That had been a revelatory twenty-four hours.)

“Steve and I aren’t having sex.” He gives Steve’s sensational delt a loving squeeze. “We’re taking our time.”

“ _Bucky_.” Steve’s whine is weak and half-hearted, like the prolonged humiliation has sapped whatever outrage he had left.

Rhodes gazes between them, back and forth. “Goddamn.”

As usual, Stark says what everyone else is too tactful to say. “What the hell? Get to the nearest enclosed space—”

“No, that’s _my_ room,” Wilson objects.

“—and get laid. Spare us your explicit yet cloying outbursts of sexual frustration.”

Bucky grins, amused, and simply says, “I’m not frustrated. I’m in love.” 

That shuts everyone up. They all go a little soft around the eyes and mouth. The only people who can read him well are Steve, who knows him by heart, and Romanoff, who knows him by profession, and both of them recognize that he’s not exaggerating.

Steve’s eyes are just about the size of the ocean, and his obscene, heaving chest is testing the limits of his cotton tee. Steve already knew— _he did_. Anytime Bucky had been alone with him in the last eighty-odd years, he’d made a point of making it fairly obvious. Knowing it and hearing it out loud are two separate things, he supposes.

Wilson rolls his eyes not unkindly. “Kiss your man already, Steve.”

When Bucky coos, “C’mere, doll,” Steve re-blushes out to his ears, and that’s reward enough, so he keeps it to an audible level that only Steve (and maybe Vision, inadvertently) can hear.

The kiss is brief, but Steve’s fingers slide through his hair to cup the back of his skull, and heat licks down his spine like a cracked whip. He keeps his eyes away from Wilson this time because he appreciates the goodwill gesture and _maybe_ they had gone overboard the last couple months, although he still can’t summon any proper guilt about it.

Barton wolf-whistles.

Vision, who is normally very adept at processing situational nuances, struggles to find the appropriate response when celebrating the sustained love of two thirty-something, centenarian supersoldiers. He politely golf-claps until Maximoff wrangles his hand down to their sides and doesn’t let go.

She looks at Stark with doe-wide eyes full of confliction. “It’s not like they’re not harming anyone.” 

“No. Wanda, _no_ ," Stark says rapidly with mounting unease.

Romanoff had bowed out of the group shortly after the love confession portion and now perches on her own stool next to Barton, spinning herself in leisurely, disdainful circles. “You put this many adults together in a glorified dorm,” Stark scoffs woundedly at her, “and you’re shocked when boundaries start to deteriorate. Honestly, we haven’t even had an orgy yet; we’re being extremely professional.”

The mention of group sex results in glances between the most unlikely of partners transpiring with varying degrees of confusion, titillation, and repulsion.

“Wow, okay.” Stark rubs thoroughly over his face in what can only be interpreted as a mental palate cleanser. “Anyways, we agreed that the incident last week was the final straw. They perpetrated _property damage_ while publicly engaging in their debauchery.”

Not one for dramatics, Wilson sighs. “Tony, they made out in a stairwell and accidentally ripped off the guardrail on the landing. It’s not great, but it’s not a felony either.” 

(He and Steve had been heading up to one of Stark’s labs in the R&D building to collect the shield after a fresh paintjob, and because it was Stark, the facility had to be futurist-minimalist and open-plan with metal skeleton staircases. Frankly, he didn’t know how he was supposed to not accost Steve at the nearest landing when his ass had been bouncing in Bucky’s face for an entire flight.)

“There were mini-projectiles raining down on innocent, unsuspecting passersby!”

(Steve had swooned picture-perfect, flushed and sex-haired, when he slid his hands into the back pockets of Steve’s hideous khakis and nibbled on the hinge of his jaw.)

“I was in the lobby, and it was only a couple bolts. Besides, I trapped them all in midair before they hit any of the nearby techs,” Maximoff clarifies, twirling a red wisp of energy around her finger.

(Steve had been mindful enough to keep a good grip on the metal railing he had just wrenched free of its fastenings. The shrieking whine of dismemberment had killed the mood. A little. Theoretically. Well, in any case, it would’ve been grossly inappropriate to resume their activities afterward.)

“We did fix that railing ourselves as well as buy an apology gift basket for each traumatized member of the staff.” He’s a formerly brainwashed assassin, not a monster, thankyouverymuch. 

“Fine,” Stark says with a petulant sort of calmness. “Let Golden Boy and Silver Sniper do whatever they want.”

Steve seems just about ready to tunnel his way back inside an Arctic icecap. “We got a little carried away. We promise to be more considerate in the future.”

“Thank you,” Maximoff enunciates, raising her brows at Stark with an expression that begs _satisfied_?

“Steve’s word is good enough for me,” Wilson states. “We done here?”

Rhodes agrees by way of saying, “I think we’ve all suffered enough for one afternoon.” 

Barton boos. “Never surrender!” Romanoff whacks his shoulder.

Bucky feigns an expression of deep cogitation. “So, in conclusion, Steve and I can have sex wherever we want, as long as you’re not around to see it?”

Everyone makes sure to express their disappointment in him in their own personalized way—aside from Barton, who air-fives him. Steve wilts defeatedly into his side.

He’s fairly certain this will be the one and only intervention hosted by the Avengers. Another mission accomplished.

* * *

“Did you really think you could make me come just from sucking face with me?” Steve asks, lamplit and hair tousled and pajamas askew in the collective Rogers-Barnes bedroom. 

He looms above Steve with a shark’s grin and remains wordless.

“You _can’t_ ,” Steve avers in a small voice, scandalized yet powerless. 

“I can’t?” he parrots, like it’s news to him, and drops onto his elbows so that there’s barely more than a breath separating them. Steve shivers underneath him. “F.R.I.D.A.Y., engage privacy mode.” 


End file.
